


if you only had time

by thinksideways



Category: American Revolution RPF, Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Afterlife, Alexander's POV, Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Kissing, M/M, Reunion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-15 01:55:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5766913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinksideways/pseuds/thinksideways
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Dying is easy, young man</i>, Washington had once told him, but that was a lie. Dying is <i>hard.</i><br/>It seems to take forever, for one thing.</p><p> </p><p>Hamilton dies, and wakes up in a world that's not quite heaven.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you only had time

**Author's Note:**

> I'm trying to drag myself out of the hellhole of angst I like to wallow in. By writing something happy! About death!  
> (It's a process.)

_Dying is easy, young man,_ Washington had once told him, but that was a lie. Dying is _hard_.

It seems to take forever, for one thing.

And talking is hard. That's the worst thing, Alexander thinks. He has all these words in his head, but when he tries to speak they come out garbled, nonsensical. That hurts more than the bullet wound, even.

(He’s always had a pretty impressive tolerance for pain. Maybe a bit too impressive.)

“This is a mortal wound, Doctor,” he manages to say, though the words come out more slurred then he intends. He has to let them know he knows he’s dying.

(Which absolutely isn’t _easy_.)

He doesn’t want them pretending he’ll recover. He has to say goodbye.

On the way back across the Hudson he hears the water slapping gently against the boat, the gulls crying overhead. He's still trying to talk. The trip seems to take years. Whatever dark hair he has left will certainly be gray by the end of the venture.

“My vision is indistinct…” he mutters, but those are not the right words, no. He’d meant to...what? His thoughts are slowing, muddying, and it's terrifying.

For everything he's lost, he's always had his brain, his words. No one’s ever taken that from him.

Ah!

“Take care of that pistol,” he murmurs to Pendleton. He tries to move his hand, gesture to the weapon. The limb doesn't obey. He's already lost feeling in his legs.

( _A mortal wound, Doctor._ )

He can feel the water beneath him, though. There's that, at least. The boat rocks gently, like a cradle, though he feels less like an infant and more like a drunkard, sprawled and slurring at the bottom of the boat.

What was he talking about? Ah yes, the pistol.

“It is undischarged and still cocked. It may go off and do harm. Pendleton knows that I did not intend to fire at him…” wait, isn't he talking to Pendleton? Their faces seem to have blurred and he can no longer tell the men apart. But there's a hand at his side, the sound of the barrel opening, the gun being unloaded. They listened, at least.

Good, to be listened to.

They make it to shore. Finally. He feels like centuries have passed. Time really is different when you’re dying.

Another doctor is there, ready. When they move him the pain makes itself known, a beastly agony in his stomach. He cannot help but cry out. Once steadied, though, he tries to turn to the doctor.

“Let Mrs. Hamilton be immediately sent for, and let the event be gradually broken to her,” he tells the man. Oh, his dear Eliza. She’s going to kill him for dying on her, like this.

 

***

 

To the priest, he says, “I have no ill will against Burr. I met him with a fixed resolution to do him no harm. I forgive all that happened.”

Perhaps the priest should be the one speaking of forgiveness, but Alexander’s never liked taking orders, so he makes sure to beat him to the punch.

He does forgive Burr, though. In hindsight (and here, dying, he supposes there is finally enough time for hindsight), he likely should have just apologized.

(Even if Burr’s accusations had been vague, they’d been correct. Probably.)

He hopes someone will pass the message of forgiveness along to Burr. Not for a while, though. Let him stew a little bit, but wouldn't want him to end up too crazy.

 

***

 

He’s never in his life had enough time but dying seems to take far too much of it. He wouldn’t mind, but talking becomes harder every hour. Moving at all is hard, really. And the pain’s growing, too. Like a creature made of fire in his belly and crawling up every limb, bit by bit.

Their faces come and go. He tries to talk to all of them but judging by their soft, pained expressions little, if any of it, makes sense. _Nothing_ about this is easy, and he thinks he'll have a word with Washington when they next meet.

Eliza's there - his dear Eliza. He'd give the world to stroke her cheek again but the most he can do is curl his fingers weakly into hers.

Angelica’s there too, crying her head off, practically looking worse than Eliza. You'd think it was her husband that was on his deathbed.

 _I doubt she'd cry half so much if it was Mr. John Church,_ he thinks. Shouldn't say that, though. Might be rude.

He's done enough to them.

 

***

 

It takes him more than a day to die. He is barely able to speak at all, toward the end. Their faces all blur.

The actual passing is easy enough. He'd meant to just rest his eyes for a moment. But when he opens them again he realizes something has changed fundamentally, though the bedroom looks much the same, albeit empty save for him.

There are no pearly gates, no angels blowing trumpets - in fact, the world looks much like the one he just left. He’s in the same _room,_ even. Yet this world is brighter, somehow. Cleaner.

And he is young again, he realizes, not a gray hair in sight. He can walk. His mind is back, firing on all cylinders

 _Poor joke, that_ , he thinks, and smiles to himself. How glorious, to have one’s mind returned.

“Hello?” he calls out, walking out of the room. He walks right out the door, calling out, though he isn't sure who he expects to answer.

“Alexander?” he hears his name, a voice that he knows but hasn't heard in some forty years. He stops, stricken dumb for a moment, and then she appears.

His mother.

He runs to embrace her, and is amazed at how _real_ she feels, solid. She smells real, too, just as he remembered - smells of spices he thought he'd forgotten the taste of and smells like the caribbean, like sun and salt.

“Alexander,” she says again, “ _mon chéri_.”

His heart swells at the familiar tones, the creole flavor of her accent. Memory does such poor justice to a person, he realizes now, and even a mind as brilliant as his could never quite capture the precise lilt of her voice, the exact way she called him _darling_.

“Did you see--” he begins, but doesn't know where to begin - _did you see everything I did? Did you see my family?_

And, unspoken - _was it enough?_

“Ah, _oui_ ,” she says, laughing. She looks in the peak of health, the sallow skin and jaundiced eyes he remembers from her death long gone, she is bright and joyous now, the woman he remembers from childhood, “I saw it all, Alexander.”

 _Well, hopefully not **all** of it, _ he thinks. There are a few things he's less than proud of, and quite a few more that a mother should never see.

He walks with her in the garden and tells her about his life, his family. They talk for hours. Or maybe days. Maybe minutes. Time is different on the other side, languid and stretched out.

Before this, he’d always felt like somewhere a clock was ticking, that time was escaping from his grasp, slipping between his fingers like water.

Here, there’s all the time in the world.

After a while, she stops him.

“There’s someone here for you,” she says, and kisses his cheek. And then she is gone, as if he had imagined her.

He turns to look.

 

***

 

Washington walks up the path like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He’s younger, too, in the prime of his life. He’s dressed in his military regalia, polished and refined, looking every bit the leader.

Washington smiles, embraces him, thumps him on the back.

“I always told you to watch your mouth,” he sighs, “I shouldn’t have to see you here, yet.”

Alexander has no response.

They speak of this world. Neither calls it Heaven - there are no angels, no clouds (other than the ones firmly set in the sky), no harpsichords ringing out.

“The weather’s always nice,” says Washington, “and you stay young. And everything is...it’s _more_ here.”

It’s an odd explanation, but Alexander thinks he knows what he means.

“It’s a process,” continues Washington, “it happens when we’re ready. Martha’s already here. Many of my men are, too. I was here to greet most of them.”

Alexander understands. Washington was always a soldier above all else.

More time passes. Or, he assumes it does. The passage of time here is so much less distinct, if indeed it exists at all.

“There’s someone here for you,” Washington says, eventually. He embraces Alexander again, draws back and looks at him.

“I’ll see you soon, son,” says Washington, and then he, too, is gone.

For once, Alexander does not object to being called _son_.

 

***

 

Laurens doesn’t walk up the path, he _runs_. And Alexander runs too, when he realizes who it is, rushes to meet him like Laurens might be yanked away from him at any moment.

Laurens wraps a hand around the back of his neck. Their foreheads touch and he can _smell_ him, a faintly smoky scent and underneath something deeper, something so indescribably _Laurens_ that it lights up the very core of him. He realizes he’s crying but doesn’t try to stop it.

“I'm sorry,” he chokes out. “I should have saved you.”

The guilt had lived inside him for so long that just saying the words is like a weight being taken from his chest. He’s never admitted it to anyone, the way the guilt had eaten at his bones, that he felt he’d abandoned his dear Laurens.

(He knows, rationally, that it was not his fault but the feeling – _I should have been there, I should have protected him_ – is needling and insistent.)

Laurens only shakes his head, makes soft hushing sounds as if he’s soothing a horse. His thumb strokes the back of Alexander’s neck, and something other than regret suddenly makes his skin feel hot.

It is a long time before they untangle their limbs, and even then Alexander does not let go of his hand.

He tells Laurens of everything he missed, updates him on Mulligan and Lafayette’s lives, tells him about his children (which chokes him up a little, realizing he can’t go to them).

He even tells Laurens about dying, and the events that led up to it, which causes Laurens to roll his eyes and sigh, but his smile is endearing.

“What was it you said to me when I dueled Lee?” Laurens pauses, pretends to consider, “ah, yes. I believe it was to not throw away my shot. And look what you did! Jesus, Alexander.”

Alexander peers around, eyes widening, “no, my dear John, I don’t think he’s here.”

Laurens pauses for a moment before the joke hits and he dissolves into laughter, clutching Alexander’s shoulder, and Alexander thinks maybe this death thing isn’t so bad, after all.

 

***

 

It’s easy, to roll back the years. They sit together in the grass, under the strange sun of the new world (he’s still so hesitant to call it heaven, but whatever it is, he’s grateful for it). He cannot keep himself from touching Laurens, small things – a hand on the shoulder, or gently resting against him. And when he moves his hand to cover Laurens’s hand, he doesn’t shift away, instead leans in, presses his shoulder against Alexander, solid and _there_.

It occurs again to Alexander that if this is heaven, the impure thoughts that rush through his head probably should not exist.

(But then, such impure thoughts are really a definition of heaven, in Alexander’s mind.)

He’s the one who takes Laurens’s chin in his hand.  Laurens swallows, and Alexander watches the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple. He stares into Laurens’s eyes with something like ecstasy.

(He knows his eyes were always complimented amongst lovers, but they can’t hold a candle to Laurens. Laurens’s eyes look brown from afar, but up close they’re a gorgeous olive green, lightening at the edges, with a gaze so piercing you can feel it in your spine.)   

“I never forgot you,” he says, “not for a moment.”

Laurens smiles, squeezes his hand, says, “I never forgot you, either.”

It’s not as if they haven’t kissed before, but that was years ago, in another time - back in the war, when the air was fraught with death and they needed one another in a way that hinged on desperate.

(They’d wanted to do other things, too, but the time and situation had never been quite right for it, always too many people around, and then there had been Eliza, and then -- well, by then it was too late.)

This time it’s easier, without the war imbued in every nerve, with this whole strange world stretched out before them, theirs to conquer. There never seems to be more than one person at a time. _It’s a process_ , Washington had said, but he hadn’t shared any of the rules with Alexander.

It’s also easier because Alexander’s thought about this - about Laurens - for years, has imagined these moments enough in fantasy that it’s easy as anything, like an instruction booklet already printed and in his hand.

Laurens’s mouth is warm and he tastes sweet and smoky, just as he had all those years ago. Laurens makes a sound somewhere is his throat, a pleased little noise that is part sigh and part hum that does far more to Alexander than it should, leads to him moving closer, pressing Laurens into the grass until he has Laurens prone, warm beneath him.

They kiss for what feels like hours. Maybe it is hours, in truth. Time matters so much _less_ here. In his head he is already trying to write down the way Laurens feels beneath him, the particular pressure and warmth of his mouth, the noises Alexander can elicit with certain movements, his mouth in certain places.

Lips to his ear, for example, cause an intake of breath, a subtle arch of the neck. Add some teeth and the noise changes, turns into a throaty moan…

(He could go on.)

Instead he pulls back and looks at Laurens, strokes his finger along the line of his jaw.

“John,” he breathes. He recalls the letter he’d once sent, long ago, emboldened by the distance and the pen in his hand and really quite a bit lovesick, if he wanted to be honest.

_I wish, my Dear Laurens, it might be in my power, by action rather than words, to convince you that I love you._

_That I love you._

_That—_

“I love you,” he says, almost blurts the word out. He’d meant for it to be more romantic, but the warmth of Laurens beneath him undoes him, seems to drain the eloquence from him so his mouth might be used for far better things.

“Dear boy,” Laurens says, pulling him close, arms wrapped around him, says it over and over again until Alexander wants to be called nothing else: _dear boy, dear boy, dear boy._

“I love you too,” Laurens says, “you’ve no idea, how I’ve missed you.”

 

***

 

In a way, they are given the life the British soldiers had robbed them of. But better - here, in this place (this world) there is no one to judge them, to whisper _sodomy_ and _sinners_ in hushed breaths.

Here, what they are is the most natural thing in the world - two people in love.

And they _are_ in love, almost disgustingly so. Alexander says it to Laurens at every opportunity, in every way he can phrase it. He whispers it in every language he knows, and some that he doesn’t, butchering the phrase so badly it makes Laurens laugh, which is just as good - if not better - than if Alexander had gotten it right in the first place. And Laurens returns the affection in kind. He is not as grandiose, does not write him love poems, but there is a sweet and tender way that he touches Alexander that says more than all of Alexander’s words ever could.

Sometimes he remembers Washington’s words - _it's a process -_ and fears what the next step will be. He doesn’t want Laurens to fade. Not when they have carved out a life here. A strange one, yes, but a _good_ one - they live like gods, immortal and beautiful in the house Alexander once died in.

“I don’t want to go,” he tells Laurens one evening. The world doesn’t pass in days and nights as their mortal one did, but sometimes the sky darkens with no rhyme or reason and the stars come out, bigger and brighter than they ever were on earth, strange constellations he can’t ever remember seeing.

(He once asked Laurens about it and Laurens kissed him and said _it’s because we’re that much closer to the stars, dear boy,_ which struck Alexander as both romantic and nonsensical at once, but he found himself liking the explanation nonetheless.)

Laurens combs through Alexander’s hair, fingertips brushing the back of his neck.

“I know, Alex,” he says, “but we all do. When it’s over...it’s worth it, Alex.”

“Who did you meet?” Alexander ventures - it’s not a topic they’ve breached before, but he’s felt different as of late, the way the body senses a storm coming - it’s a process, and another step is coming, whether he wants it or not.

Laurens pauses, fingers still moving through his hair.

“Not many,” he says, dodging the question, “I died young.”

(As if Alexander needed reminding.)

“I won’t leave you again,” promises Alexander, as if he has control over the whole ordeal. He pretends he does.

Laurens has no real response, only strokes his hands down Alexander’s back, a soft smile that Alexander can’t quite decipher on his face.

 

***

 

Alexander doesn’t recall falling asleep (sleep isn’t a necessary thing, here, more hobby than anything else), but he wakes to Laurens’s hands on his arms, gently shaking him awake.

“Alexander,” says Laurens, his voice soft but flavored by something, a bit of urgency Alexander has had yet to hear in this world, “Alexander there’s...there’s someone here to see you.”

The same words spoken by his mother, by Washington. The harbinger of one person (ghost?) fading and another coming to take their place.

_No._

He clutches at Laurens’s hands but they are already gone - _he’s gone_. Dread knotting in his stomach, Alexander rises from the bed, hears a knocking at the door. Odd. None of the other ghosts knocked.

(One face has been in his mind, of course. But he dares not get his hopes up.)

He walks to the doorway. The knocking sounds again, more urgent. But before Alexander can reach the door the knob twists (it is unlocked - of course it’s unlocked, it had only been Laurens and him for ages), and the door swings open.

Alexander gasps.

Phillip stands before him, looking just as he had when Alexander had last seen him before the duel. His crooked smile is bright as a sunbeam, the same smile he’d had as a child, and Alexander is undone.

“Pops!” exclaims Philip, joyous, and Alexander already has the boy in his arms, is unable to stop himself from weeping against the boy.

Philip holds him for a moment, as if he is the father and Alexander the son, and then he draws back, still smiling.

“I’m fine,” he says, “pops, don’t cry, I’m fine.”

Alexander tries to obey, wipes the heel of his palm against his teary eyes.

“I shouldn’t have…” he begins - it’s like Laurens but worse, because while Laurens’s death had been a more abstract guilt, he had told Philip directly to aim at the sky. He feels he’d caused that death as surely as he’d caused his own.

“I would have anyway,” Philip anticipates the apology, brushes it off, “I’m not a scoundrel.”

“It’s not your fault,” he says, and Alexander tries to believe it.

“Besides,” says Philip, “we have other things to talk about. Like why the **_fuck_** did you name another kid Philip?”

Alexander can’t help but laugh.

 

***

 

“Dad,” says Philip, apropos of nothing - they had been sitting idly at the lakeside, watching the breeze run ripples across the surface. Alexander is learning to be quiet.

Philip’s face looks strange, almost blank, confused, “dad I haven’t...I haven’t done this before.”

“Done what?” asks Alexander, suddenly concerned, but Philip seems to ignore him.

“There’s someone here to see you,” says Philip, as if he's reciting a line memorized long ago. But he doesn't disappear. He stays solid, and then his face brightens, like he’s aware of himself again.

“Let’s go greet them!” He rises and Alexander follows, unsure of what’s happening but glad Philip is still here.

(He can’t stand to see him go again.)

 

***

 

They come up the path, one by one.

His mother is first. She hasn’t aged a day. She embraces him. Philip she regards with a sort of awe, alternating between hugging him close and drawing back to look at him, mouth agape. When Philip hears the creole flavor in her accent he leans in, whispers something in her ear, causing her to break into great peals of laughter.

“The boy can count in French!” she exclaims, laughing, and Alexander can’t help but laugh with her.

Washington is next, Martha at his side. Alexander embraces them both, and Washington grasps Philip’s hand, shakes it firmly.

“Your father’s a good man,” he says, and Philip nods. Alexander tries not to blush.

One more figure comes, and Alexander cannot help but break from the group, go to him. He embraces Laurens, not realizing until this moment how sure he’d been that he’d lost him again.

“You’re here,” he whispers, half a question, half to confirm it to himself.

“Yes,” murmurs Laurens, “yes, dear boy, we’re all here.”

And maybe, Alexander thinks, it is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time attempting Lams, attempting afterlife, and attempting non-smut stuff. Thank you for sticking with me.  
> Any thoughts/comments are loved and appreciated <33
> 
> also if you're so inclined you can find me on tumblr at thinksideways.tumblr.com


End file.
